Heartbreak High season 3: Hannah Carroll Chapman, Thomas Weatherall and James Majoos on highschool experience

Heartbreak High creator Hannah Carroll Chapman was feeling nostalgic.

Nostalgic for the updated iteration of the show, which will wrap up this week after three seasons, and also nostalgic for her own teen years.

No matter how old you are, you always remember your high school years, whether you want to or not. It’s such a formative time in our lives when we’re discovering who we are and how we fit in with the world and the people around us.

It’s also a time when every emotion is heightened, every thing that happens to you, no matter how small or actually inconsequential, is life and death, and the potency of those feelings never fully fade away.

That excited flutter when you stole a look at your crush, the embarrassment when someone catches you looking, the hurt when your best friend ditched you for someone else, it’s all still swirling in our memory banks.

It’s one of the reasons why Heartbreak High has been such a hit with not just young people whose adolescent experiences are now or recent history, but even those audiences whose high school years are decades in the past.

The kids are different now – more aware, more empowered, more connected – but the emotions of that coming-of-age era is universal, and therefore, relatable. Sometimes uncomfortably so.

“I was one of the weird freaky kids in high school,” Chapman told The Nightly. “We sat at the back of the tennis courts and everyone thought we were stoners, but we weren’t even that cool.

“But I loved the last few years of high school because I was growing into myself, I was experiencing my first love, and I’d found my people. I’d found those friendships that are so rare sometimes in high school where you find the people you connect with, and who kind of match your freak and match your weird.

“It was really nice when writing this whole series, but particularly this final one, to think about that, and about how it felt when I was leaving high school, and the huge emotions of it, of being sent out into the real world.”

The Heartbreak High kids are graduating, and with that final year of school, there are those significant markers of the big exams, muck-up day, Schoolies and, most significantly, the questions of what’s next.

Will we still be friends? Are my marks going to be good enough? Am I choosing the correct path for my future?

Just as Australian and global audiences asked themselves those questions at 17, so too do the Heartbreak High characters.

“It’s so overwhelming, like a gun to your head, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’,” Chapman said. “I made so many mistakes in choosing what I thought I wanted to be because I didn’t f—king know. I was 17.

“I always wanted this show to say to teens, but particularly Australian teens, you don’t have to have it all figured out, you can make mistakes, you can f—k up, and it’s going to be OK. You’ll figure it out eventually.

“I’ve always wanted the show to feel hopeful in that way.”

That was where Chapman started six years ago - exactly the length of high school in Australia (except in the ACT) – with the series, a reboot/revival of the original 1990s show, set in the same narrative continuity but with a whole new cohort of characters.

These teens were more diverse - different cultural backgrounds, including several First Nations characters, queer, neurodivergent – and even though there are hijinks and dramas including a group mushroom trip in the woods on camp, perfectly set to an Enya song (it is a TV show after all), the aim was to reflect Australian high schools.

“I hope we brought authentic representation to screen,” actor Thomas Weatherall, 25, who played Malakai, said of the show’s legacy. “For all the glamour and sort of absurdness and craziness that Heartbreak can be, there’s a real essence of truth at the forefront, and always threaded through each scene.

“I wasn’t doing quite the things that these kids are doing when I was in high school, but it was very prevalent. This isn’t that far gone from my generation of high school graduates, and what’s happening now.

“I think it’s a beautiful representation of what being a young person is right now.”

Not just on screen but in the production too. The writers room had scribes who were First Nations, queer and autistic. Weatherall, a Kamilaroi man who has written his own one-man play, Blue, that was staged at Belvoir, was invited to sit in with the writers in season two and then asked to co-write an episode in season three.

Writing and directing was Weatherall’s first love and passion in the arts – “acting has been a really lovely accident” – and he said he was fortunate that Heartbreak High’s producers extended that offer to him.

That episode has key moments for his character Malakai, but what he really loved was to write the other characters for the actors he had been watching perform for years.

“I kept trying to write (Malakai) out of the episode,” Weatherall said, with a laugh. “I was trying to make him disappear because I didn’t want it to feel like I was just trying to write something cool for myself.

“Because I know Malakai so well, I kind of went, ‘I’m not interested in you, I’m interested in trying to find the voice of Amerie or Cash or whoever else it might be.’”

One of those someone elses is Darren, a queer, biracial, non-binary student and aspiring actor, played by James Majoos, a fan favourite celebrated for his difference.

“Initially, maybe Darren appeared as this tokenistic, maybe stereotypical queer best friend trope,” Majoos said. “The show sort of lent into that, but I was interested in where we could take Darren outside of that, and who they might present themselves as, and we gently touch on that this season where we can.

“I was certainly aware of how rare it is to have a character like Darren, and also how rare it is to play a character like Darren, but mainly how rare it is for audiences to see a character like that, especially in Australia. I tried to go into it with as much care as possible.”

Majoos was homeschooled in his senior high school years so he never did muck-up day or Schoolies, but for many Australians, it was a rite-of-passage, albeit a strange one.

Chapman was excited to write that episode because she will get to introduce the concept to a global audience.

“When you think about it, it’s deeply weird,” she said. “We inflicts tens of thousands of teenagers on this small-ish town in Queensland and just let them run rampant.”

Her own Schoolies experience included watching her friend get a meat pie tattooed on a shoulder blade – and other things too much for polite company.

We all have those stories, because there is something special about that time in your life when you can mess up, be an idiot and grow from those mistakes, and the show is nothing if not a plea for compassion.

“It’s always fascinated me, looking at the response to the show because I do lurk sometimes to see how people respond to it, and it is a point of frustration for me where some of our audience, in particular the younger ones, are quite unforgiving of some of our characters who are more of the antagonists.

“Particularly Harper in season one, Sasha, sometimes they can be quite vitriolic about those characters. I know that Asher (Yasbincek, who plays Harper) and Gemma (Chua-Tran, who plays Sasha) have received lots of DMs about it.”

Forgiveness and empathy is a core part of Heartbreak High’s mission, a foundation laid by Chapman at the very start. She wanted it to be full of joy, hope and humour while still dealing with real issues and experiences.

So, it’s about finding space to showcase characters who make the wrong choices and be hurtful to each other. That’s honest.

“It’s OK, you might hurt people’s feelings, but it’s important to bounce back from that, to apologise and to make amends.

“Particularly when it comes to female friendships. If you forgive the sins that have been committed against you by your friends, and find the friends that will forgive you your sins, that’s really important. You’re fostering those friendships with people who are willing to see you for who you really and say, ‘I still love you’.”

Chapman recently had dinner with a friend the other night, a bestie from high school, and they were laughing about all their ex-boyfriends. “It hit me,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’ve been through so many of my stupid romances, and yet here you are, sitting with me at dinner and we are the last people standing’.”

Over the three seasons, the Heartbreak characters have grown, ready but not quite ready to face all the open possibilities of the next chapter.

There were laughs and tears on set, filming those final scenes, and there will be laughs and tears for audiences in those closing moments of the show when they say goodbye.

The cast and crew went on the journey together, and so did the audience, whether it’s just to watch these characters or to reminisce their own youthful adventures.

But there’s also the sweet spot of both, because as Weatherall reminded us, “Coming of age never really ends, and I hope that audiences are able to remember that and latch onto that.”

Heartbreak High season three is on Netflix from March 25